Two hundred Boy Scouts from Ventura County will be hosting their “Camporee” event at Sage Ranch Park this Saturday. The campground is separated by a barbed wire fence from one of America’s worst nuclear meltdowns.
They’ll be setting up tents, singing around the bonfire and roasting marshmallows… and may be be exposed to potent carcinogens.
I can’t tell you how often I’ve wished that I’d known about the radiation and toxic chemicals at the Santa Susana Field Lab before moving miles away from it, and deciding to raise my family here. I think the parents of these Boy Scouts should to have that information as well.
The Boy Scout leader I spoke with yesterday didn’t know that 500,000 gallons of the potent carcinogen TCE was dumped into the fields on the other side of Sage Ranch Park’s fence.
He had never heard of the 60% higher cancer incidence rates for those living within two miles of the site. He knew that the park is a beautiful, natural area… and the only group spot available in all of Southern California this weekend. It’s not his fault that he only has three days to research thousands of pages of reports before deciding if the site is safe, after a year of planning to host it there.
At the end of the day, this is Boeing’s fault. Boeing originally agreed to clean up the site to residential standards by 2017. But that never happened and today they are pushing to clean up only 2% of the contamination on site – by 2034."
Boeing knows how dangerous the Santa Susana Field Lab is. In their own report they stated that in some areas of the site, if people lived there, 96 out of 100 people would get cancer.
And this isn’t the first time they’ve used the Boy Scouts as part of their PR schemes. They’ve lead them on hikes through the site itself, so they could try to put a wholesome, “all-American” spin on their environmental disaster. Because a coverup is cheaper than a cleanup.
We only have a few days to inform hundreds of Boy Scout parents about the risks of letting their sons camp right next to this toxic site.